from the civilian-casualties-in-the-war-on-drugs dept

Here's the latest on how we're winning the Drug War, stripped of the DEA's deceit and spin by the Office of the Inspector General. The report [PDF] takes a look at three incidents the DEA was involved with in Honduras during 2012. The DEA's FAST (Foreign-Deployed Advisory and Support Team) team was supposed to help Honduran drug warriors (TRT-- Tactical Response Teams) fight the local drug war. It was only supposed to act in an advisory role, but it took a much more hands-on approach.

A seized boat loaded with cocaine lost power in the middle of a river on its way back to the nearest village. While drifting around awaiting rescue, a passenger boat "made contact" with the seized boat (called a "pipante"). All hell broke loose.

Video recorded by a CBP surveillance plane shows that, following contact, officers in the pipante fired at the passenger boat. The gunfire continued for about 26 seconds, including several seconds when officers in the pipante appear to be shooting at people in the water who had fallen or jumped from the passenger boat.

The spin machine began shortly after this. First, the DEA claimed it wasn't a passenger boat, but rather drug dealers coming to reclaim their stash. Gunshots were fired by people on the boat, according to the joint task force, even though video of the incident showed otherwise. And the DEA apparently felt its advisory role included telling Honduran helicopter door gunners where to shoot.

At least one DEA FAST member observing the encounter from a helicopter directed a Honduran door gunner to fire his machine gun. The door gunner then fired multiple rounds at the passenger boat.

Finally:

No evidence of narcotics was ever found on the passenger boat.

These are ugly facts, but the DEA -- along with the Honduran task force -- did everything they could to prevent these facts from being uncovered. As for the civilians caught in the literal crossfire? Sorry about that. Maybe try moving to a country without a drug war.

FAST and TRT did not conduct a search and rescue mission for individuals from the passenger boat who may have been injured, and instead focused solely on recovering the law enforcement officers stranded in the pipante. After the recovery of the officers and the cocaine from the pipante, the ground team loaded the helicopters and returned to base.

And the DEA might have gotten away with it if too, if it hadn't been for pesky, frightened locals.

Embassy officials soon received reports from Ahuas that innocent civilians had been killed and injured and that there had been abusive police activity in a nearby village.

Not that this evidence (which the OIG report diplomatically refers to as "conflicting") changed the DEA's narrative. It continued to insist police were shot at by passengers on the boat and that it had no involvement in the hail of gunfire that left four dead and four injured. Only when local law enforcement backed up the civilians' stories did the DEA slightly alter its version of the facts.

DEA changed its mind after a local Honduran police report asserted four people were killed (including two pregnant women) and four others were injured after a helicopter with DEA personnel confused cargo in a passenger boat for bales of drugs and opened fire.

It was all a big misunderstanding. Which left innocent people dead. The mere existence of drugs shouldn't be a reason to open fire on other humans. I mean, Honduras isn't the Philippines. And the DEA should be on hand to prevent this sort of thing from happening, not telling door gunmen how much to lead civilian targets in a moving boat.

The DEA's continued lies led to even more obfuscation.

U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Lisa Kubiske authorized State’s Diplomatic Security (DS) to investigate the three incidents after she became frustrated by her inability to obtain information from DEA and concerned the Honduran investigation would not satisfy those interested in the May 11 incident. DEA refused to share information with DS or provide access to relevant personnel.

The DEA then claimed it had already investigated itself and found nothing that said one way or the other that firing on unarmed civilians was against the Drug War rules. But as the OIG points out, the DEA's definition of "investigation" meant handing over a stack of forms to someone unwilling and uninterested in performing an internal investigation.

DOJ OIG found that the resulting investigation was little more than a paper exercise. DEA assigned the matter to a FAST Supervisor who did not conduct any interviews and merely collected written statements from FAST agents – statements we found in a few instances were improperly prepared or omitted material facts, such as the direction given by a FAST member to the Honduran door gunner to fire his machine gun at the passenger boat. The FAST Supervisor did not determine whether weapons checks, as required by DEA procedures, were conducted after the shooting (they were not). He also did not seek to interview or obtain witness statements and reports from FAST’s U.S. and Honduran partners who participated in the operation. We also did not find evidence that he gave any consideration to the accounts of survivors from the passenger boat or local residents of the village.

It then took these alternative facts to its Congressional overseers, hoping to head off any additional scrutiny.

DOJ OIG found that DEA’s misplaced confidence in its assumptions of the events that took place on May 11, and its failure to conduct a thorough post-incident investigation, resulted in DEA making several factual representations to DOJ leadership and to Congress that were inaccurate, incomplete, or based upon unreliable and insufficient information. This included representations regarding the central premises of DEA’s narrative regarding the May 11 incident, namely that individuals in the passenger boat had fired first and Honduran officers returned fire, and that no DEA agents discharged their weapons.

The evidence presented by the DEA to Congress did not include recordings that called into question its depiction of a gunfight (rather than the one-sided bullet hell it actually was). Instead, its narrative before Congress utilized a highly-questionable "Sources of Information" (SOIs).

As we describe in Chapter Five, SOI #2 provided inconsistent accounts of the May 11 incident to DEA over the course of three interviews and admitted to lying to DEA during his/her first interview. Yet, DEA failed to adequately question SOI #2 about his/her multiple versions of events or confront him/her with the inconsistencies between his/her various stories and the May 11 video footage. Further, even after SOI #2 admitted to lying to DEA and providing conflicting accounts, we found no evidence that DEA officials clarified or modified their prior representations to DOJ leadership and Congress.

The tales that began in Honduras grew larger in the telling. With the DEA controlling the investigation and the evidence, Congress heard a story that bore almost no resemblance to the actual incident.

[D]EA officials described information favorable to DEA’s positions while omitting unfavorable information, such as video evidence of TRT officers shooting at people who had fallen or jumped into the water, the inconsistent TRT reporting and TRT gun-planting incident, and the results of a preliminary report from the Honduran National Police that made findings critical of law enforcement actions on May 11. DEA officials also did not disclose the existence or results of the video enhancement and analysis by the DS video analyst who found no evidence indicative of gunfire from the passenger boat. Moreover, DEA continued to inaccurately and incompletely characterize its role in Operation Anvil as being supportive and advisory only.

With one level of oversight thwarted, the DEA started fending off the Inspector General's office.

DEA failed to timely produce numerous responsive e-mails of certain senior DEA officials connected to Operation Anvil, without justification. While DEA promptly produced responsive e-mails of non-Senior Executive Service (SES) employees, it initially refused to produce to the DOJ OIG responsive e-mails of SES employees despite the fact that the OIG was entitled to access the material pursuant to the Inspector General Act. Only after lengthy discussions over a 4- month period were some of those e-mails of SES employees finally produced to the OIG. Others were not produced until as much as 11 months after we asked for them.

Second, while DEA produced a large number of documents in response to our requests, it omitted certain highly relevant reports and statements related to the specific issues of our review. For example, none of the eight document productions provided us with the initial witness statement of the only percipient DEA witness in the boat during the May 11 drug interdiction that resulted in the deaths of four individuals, even though this statement was clearly within the scope of our requests.

This is how we fight the Drug War. With lies and cover-ups and press releases touting the number of kilograms seized while making no mention of the collateral damage. And this is why Congressional oversight is mostly useless. It can't compel the DEA to tell the truth. All it can do is wait for the truth to come out, which is years after the fact and often the result of other entities: whistleblowers, Inspector General investigations, FOIA requesters, etc. As long as the fight is viewed as a "good" one, agency sins will be forgiven and politicians will continue to believe internal policy changes are anywhere near as substantial as internal culture changes.

from the that-name-is-taken dept

Anyone familiar with internet culture will be familiar with Godwin's law. It goes roughly something like this: the longer a discussion goes on on the internet, the higher the probability that a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis will be made. This axiom enjoys lofty status on the internet -- so often have we seen its claim played out in threads and discussions.

Godwin's Law is, of course, not a real law. But there may soon be a real Godwin's Law on the books, stemming from the murder of Robert Godwin Sr. and the subsequent video upload to Facebook of the murder.

Erie Feinberg, heads a company called GIPEC, specializing in deep Internet searches looking for criminals or terrorists. He is now calling for new federal regulations so what happened in Godwin’s case doesn’t happen again.

“I think it starts in Cleveland, in Ohio right now, where everybody calls their congressman and their senator," Feinberg told the FOX 8 I-Team. He wants new limits on websites posting horrific crimes. "They created this world, and it's not an excuse to say, ‘You can't expect us to police every bit of content post and video.’ Well, you created this. You should secure it."

Feinberg isn't the first person to stamp his or her feet in the wake of Robert Godwin's murder with calls for social media sites to do something, anything, to keep this type of content from ever being shared on the computer screens of the masses. What's frustrating about these types of screeds is how clear it is, at times even to the person screeding, that there is little if anything that can be done by companies like Facebook beyond what they do already to stop any of this. The problem is how tantalizing it is to those grieving, as well as to those of us viewing what happened to Godwin from afar, to try to place blame on a site like Facebook for ever having shown us this type of terrible content. You can hear it in Feinberg's words: "You created this. You should secure it." (And let's not even bother digging into the more cynical take that this kind of "do something!" regulation might benefit Feinberg's own company... )

Facebook already works quite hard to take down violent videos of this kind from its pages. However, there is little it can do to prevent the content from being uploaded initially. The site relies on users to report when images and videos ought to be taken down. The takedowns can only happen after the upload. The fundamental question is: do we want a world where user videos can be uploaded to Facebook? If we do, we need to understand the collateral content that may come with that. No Godwin's Law that would pass constitutional muster is going to solve the problem. And no amount of fist-shaking at this tragedy is going to make Facebook magically able to solve it either.

The calls for something to be done are calls based on emotion. Understandable emotion. You can, again, hear it in Feinberg's words as he pushes for a real-life Godwin's Law.

"There's gotta be some good or some positives out of this heinous act," Feinberg said.

No, there doesn't. This isn't a movie. Bad things happen and there isn't always something that can, or should, be done about it. Certainly, laying blame at the feet of Facebook because a single user uploaded a murder video is wholly inappropriate.

from the where-did-you-get-your-law-degree? dept

Earlier this week, we wrote about the silly take at Wired, more or less suggesting that it was somehow Facebook's issue that a troubled individual took a video of himself randomly killing an elderly man and then uploaded the video to Facebook. Unfortunately, others have had similar takes, including the New Yorker's Steve Coll, whose piece is mostly balanced and admits that it's basically impossible for Facebook to prevent this thing... but then at the end ignores all that and says, effectively, "Well, Facebook's big so it has no excuse not to do something."

That is a fair and restrained assessment, but Facebook cannot expect to plead growing pains or a lack of resources for much longer. At the end of last year, the corporation reported holding almost thirty billion dollars in cash and marketable securities; its annual profit exceeded ten billion dollars for the first time. Facebook can afford to slow down and take on more of the risks associated with curating content—the risks of not doing so being increasingly glaring. Its engineers might, in addition to their habitual writing of improved algorithms, consider the durable oath of a profession that has long wrestled with the kinds of ethical quandaries that arise from innovating in the pursuit of the greater good: first, do no harm.

That's one of those things that sounds good to someone who hasn't thought through the actual consequences of what they're saying. When you argue that Facebook should "slow down" and "take on more risks associated with curating content," you're arguing that Facebook should censor more content. Think of how that plays out in reality. Because we know already: every time Facebook takes down "good" content, the same media folks start bitching and screaming about how Facebook is so bad at moderating content. Remember Facebook blocking Napalm Girl? While Coll didn't address that issue himself, just months ago, he raved about the importance of Napalm Girl and how adults need to see this kind of thing to "pause and reflect upon the costs of war." But, apparently having them confront murder is a step too far.

But... that is not the worst take on this whole thing. So far, that award goes to Danny Cevallos, a legal analyst for CNN and apparently a real practicing criminal defense attorney. His argument is not to blame Facebook... but to criminalize posting murder videos to Facebook. It's not often that you see a criminal defense attorney arguing for more crimes, but here we are.

To be fair to Cevallos, he's not the first to come up with an idea this dumb. As online video became more popular, and as stories emerged of people (often young kids) filming themselves doing stupid things online, various grandstanding politicians have often argued that filming crimes should be illegal, arguing (often without any evidence) that the only reason these people were doing stupid/illegal things was because of the draw of being able to film them and post them online. This reached a fever pitch a few years ago when a legislator in South Carolina picked up on an exaggerated moral panic about the idea of the "knockout game" -- in which people filmed themselves punching unsuspecting people -- and wanted to pass a law saying that it was illegal to film a crime.

That's more or less where Cevallos goes, though he'd limit it to just murder videos:

Use the law to deter this sort of depraved predator. We can criminalize the criminal's act of broadcasting his crime.

In for a bit, Cevallos digs in deep:

When it gets into the realm of a horrendous crime like the recent shooting, what is to be done? As heretical as it is for a criminal defense attorney like myself to say, deterrence could help. More criminal legislation: enhancements, penalties, mandatory minimums.

And how the crime and its victims are legally framed is key. Whether it's murder or simple assault, acts of violence that are also posted online create additional victims in the audience: the public at large. Broadcasts of intentional violence intimidate a civilian population, just as terrorism does.

What?!? Now he's comparing broadcasting a murder tape as terrorism? Who exactly is intimidated? Will it horrify people? Yes, absolutely. But that's not illegal, nor should it be.

Also, there's this. How the hell is this actually a deterrence? What kind of person will say "Well, I was going to shoot that guy and broadcast it on Facebook, but since broadcasting it is illegal, I guess I won't." Really. Who? If you're going to murder someone, you've already kinda committed to breaking basically the most serious law we have. Somehow, I doubt that the additional charge of "Oh, and he put it on Facebook," is going to change the incentives much.

And, then, of course, Cevallos starts digging deeper with a really terrible First Amendment analysis (especially for a media company like CNN to publish). All it's missing is the explicit use of the bullshit "fire in a crowded theater" trope.

The challenge here is that criminalizing Facebook broadcasts of one's crimes does potentially infringe upon one's freedom of speech about those crimes. The US Supreme Court held that the original Son of Sam law ran afoul of the First Amendment, because the suppression of speech was not narrowly tailored enough.

However, the First Amendment has plenty of limits, and today, almost all the states and the federal government have laws prohibiting those criminals who plan to profit from their crimes from doing so. The ability to profit still shouldn't be constitutionally-protected.

Pretty simple rule of thumb: your First Amendment analysis is bad and you should feel bad if it's basically limited to "Well, there are exceptions to the First Amendment, so surely the exception I want should be fine." Hell, it's near the top of Popehat's famous "censorship tropes" in discussions of free speech.

But Cevallos isn't done. After already carving out a new exception to the First Amendment, he then also argues that posting your own murder video maybe would fit under the very limited and extraordinarily narrow "obscenity" exception to the First Amendment:

It's a tougher question whether "killing videos" could be additionally penalized as obscenity. This is because the term "obscenity" generally applies to depictions of sexual acts. The Supreme Court has held that violence alone is not obscenity.

On the other hand, obscenity may extend to deviant acts that are not sexual, and images of extreme cruelty alone could possibly be obscene, as evidenced by a case involving videos of animal cruelty. Indeed, "animal crush videos" — which are every bit as horrific as they sound — may be outlawed, even if sexual activity is not depicted.

Criminalizing the broadcast of crimes like Robert Godwin's shooting death is doable. It won't prevent these attacks, but it will deter them.

It will deter them... based on what evidence exactly? Just in your head?

Finally after all that nonsense, Cavallos points out just about the only accurate thing, and hilariously calls it "perverse": the fact that what these videos do is provide all the evidence law enforcement needs to prosecute individuals for the crimes they're committing on video:

The perverse upside is that social media creates a treasure trove of evidence: the criminals of social media may harm the society that views them, but they often assist the authorities in prosecuting them.

Yeah, that's not "perverse." That's why the rest of your article makes no sense. The video is evidence of a crime. Layering on another, much lesser crime just for posting the video doesn't deter crime. It deters people making it easier to catch, arrest and convict themselves of committing crimes. CNN needs better legal analysts.

from the get-a-grip dept

As you've probably heard by now, on Sunday a horrific act of violence happened when a clearly disturbed individual apparently decided to (1) randomly murder an elderly man walking down the street, (2) film the entire process from searching for the guy, approaching him, talking to him and then shooting him, and (3) upload it to Facebook for people to see. The police initially reported that he streamed the murder live, but it was later clarified that, while he had streamed some other commentary live earlier in the day, the murder was filmed separately and then uploaded. Still, as happens all too often in these situations, people are immediately jumping to the moral panic stage and asking, as Wired did quickly after, what kind of responsibility Facebook should take. The title of the article says that Facebook "must now face itself" for streaming the murder -- but then seems to have trouble explaining just what it needs to face (perhaps because... there isn't anything for it to face).

And when the manhunt is over, and the grieving begins, so too will Facebook’s soul-searching.

Facebook is not the first media company to struggle with the prospect of unwittingly broadcasting violence shortly after being uploaded. When news anchor Christine Chubbuck killed herself on live TV in 1974, the station was unable to stop the event from airing, but never showed the footage again. The number of viewers who actually saw the event was minimal. Facebook has taken similar steps, pulling Stephens’ video shortly after it was posted. “This is a horrific crime and we do not allow this kind of content on Facebook,” the company said in a statement. “We work hard to keep a safe environment on Facebook, and are in touch with law enforcement in emergencies when there are direct threats to physical safety.”

Uh, right. So... what else does anyone expect Facebook to do? It's not like it can magically stop murders. Or stop people from initially uploading or streaming a murder video. Yes, it can (and does) take those down, and it can (and does) block re-uploading. But to pin this on Facebook seems... really, really weird. It's almost as if whenever there's a murder people want to find someone or something else to blame other than the person doing the killing.

The article kind of admits, later on, that expecting Facebook to do anything is impossible... but that just raises the question of why write a whole article asking what Facebook should do if the answer is "uh, it can't and shouldn't do anything."

Facebook, of course, is a decentralized system, with millions of freelance “reporters” with unfettered access to the public. By the time the company removed the video, thousands had already watched it, and it lives on in other corners of the internet. Meanwhile, the company has resisted calls to use its algorithms to censor videos like this before they are ever posted–not just because it does not want to be accused of violating speech rights, but also because training computers to identify real-time or recent murder is hard. Facebook has long relied on an army of humans to scour videos uploaded to its site. With videos, and especially Live videos, that job goes from hard to impossible—not even Facebook employees can watch a video before it posts.

Currently, Facebook relies on other Facebook users to flag videos that need to be taken down. But that means that someone has to watch the horror before others can be spared it. The onus falls to the viewers, not the company, to determine what is appropriate, what should be shared, and what should be flagged for removal. Traditional media companies have finely-wrought guidelines and policies to help them make these decisions, but Facebook depends on us to do it.

But even after basically admitting that this is an impossibility, the article still then says:

And now it might very well be time for the company to roll up its own sleeves and get to work.

And get to work doing what exactly? Again, Facebook isn't going to stop a murder. And I don't care how good the AI gets, it's unlikely any time soon to say "hey, that video is some person killing another person, don't stream that." There is no sleeve rolling to do on the Facebook side of the equation and even exploring this question seems silly. Yes, senseless murders and violence lead people to go searching for answers, but sometimes there are no answers. And demanding answers from a random tool that was peripherally used connected to the senseless violence doesn't seem helpful at all.

from the always-on-microphones dept

Well, you knew this was coming sooner or later. Reports came out this week (via the paywalled site The Information) that law enforcement in Bentonville, Arkansas issued a warrant to Amazon asking for any recordings that Amazon had from its Echo device that may have been relevant to a murder case they're working on. At issue is the Amazon Echo device owned by James Andrew Bates, who is accused of murdering Victor Collins a year ago. The key bit of information here is that Amazon refused to hand over any recordings that it might have logged, but did hand over more general information about Bates' account and purchases.

Of course, just the request for possible audio information has lots of people paying attention. This kind of thing has been predicted for ages -- now that pretty much everyone has "always on" microphones all around them in the form of either internet-of-things connected devices like the Echo, or merely your mobile phone with Apple's Siri or Google Now. The police in this case appear to be searching for any info that could be supplied by the devices that spy on us:

Police say Bates had several other smart home devices, including a water meter. That piece of tech shows that 140 gallons of water were used between 1AM and 3AM the night Collins was found dead in Bates' hot tub. Investigators allege the water was used to wash away evidence of what happened off of the patio. The examination of the water meter and the request for stored Echo information raises a bigger question about privacy. At a time when we have any number of devices tracking and automating our habits at home, should that information be used against us in criminal cases?

Bates' attorney argues that it shouldn't. "You have an expectation of privacy in your home, and I have a big problem that law enforcement can use the technology that advances our quality of life against us," defense attorney Kimberly Weber said. Of course, there's also the question of how reliable information is from smart home devices. Accuracy can be an issue for any number of IoT gadgets. However, an audio recording would seemingly be a solid piece of evidence, if released.

Amazon’s Echo (and its main competitor, the Google Home) works by passively recording everything you say. None of this information is actually sent to Amazon. Think of it more like taking notes in class — as if you’re listening but not writing anything down until your professor actually says something important. But when the Echo hears “Alexa” (or whatever your activation phrase is), it begins to actively record. That snippet of speech is then sent to Amazon’s cloud servers, where your recorded message is run through a speech-recognition neural network and a response is sent back to you, whether that’s playing a song on Spotify or giving you the weather forecast.

Amazon keeps all of the recordings of you asking Alexa to play WNYC or of you setting a timer for 20 minutes. You can jump into the Alexa companion app and hear all of your requests again if you want to see just how bored you sound when talking to your home voice robot. Sure, it’s slightly creepy — but Amazon also tracks pretty much every move you make while you’re online shopping as well.

That article also notes that Amazon has no officially stated policy about how long it keeps recordings, but there's an anecdotal suggestion that it's deleted after six months.

Of course, some people will immediately use this as a reason why no one should ever have these kinds of devices -- but that ignores that they can actually be quite useful as well. This is the trade off that we continually go through with modern technology these days. The ability to make use of certain tools and services also involves revealing certain information about you -- and then you have two potential problems: first, what does the company giving you the service do with that info and, second, what would third parties (e.g., law enforcement or hackers) like to do with that info if they could get a hold of it.

This is the kind of thing that everyone -- especially in the tech industry -- should be discussing, but seems afraid to even bring it up, for fear of scaring people off of these new devices and services. This is ridiculously short-sighted. The industry should be much more upfront about this. It should be much clearer about what information is collected, what is done with it, how long it's kept and who has access to it. Even more important is that it should give the end user full control over that data. That is, let users log in and see what information is collected and how it's been accessed. Similarly, allow the user to delete that info -- perhaps while letting them know it might impact the quality of services. By being more transparent, and giving more control to the end users, then people can actually get the benefits of some of these services, without having to worry about the problems (or at least making decisions to minimize the risk).

Amazon may have chosen not to give the info in this case (if it even had any info to give) -- and that's good. But these kinds of requests are going to keep coming. And ignoring the issue isn't going to help anyone.

from the new-phone-who-dis dept

In a move they're describing as "extraordinary" and "unprecedented," Ontario Provincial Police will send text messages to about 7,500 people on Thursday to ask for information about an unsolved homicide.

Investigators are calling it a "digital canvass" — the high-tech equivalent of knocking on thousands of doors for information.

The police are utilizing "dumps" from cell towers in the area to obtain these phone numbers. And that's all they've obtained, apparently. Using the list of connected phones in the area at the time of the murder, the police are sending text messages asking recipients to fill out a website questionnaire to help police find the killer.

As much as this might seem like an intrusion, it's probably preferable to the alternative: sending out dozens of officers to question potentially thousands of witnesses. Obviously, it works out well for the police. But it also works out for citizens. Nothing obliges anyone to respond to the unsolicited texts and answering a few questions on a website is far less annoying than being questioned at home by officers peeking through open doors to see if they can spot anything resembling indicia of criminal activity. Why make the entire day a waste? Why not make a few ancillary arrests while investigating an unrelated crime?

Unfortunately, it appears ignoring the message (or sending back "UNSUBSCRIBE") isn't going to keep the cops from using your phone for their communications.

Investigators will also consider calling the numbers of people who don't respond voluntarily, but they would be required to obtain another court order to do so.

The other troubling aspect is that the police obviously have no interest in destroying the phone data they've collected. It appears this will be held onto until the investigation is closed, even though the majority of the harvested numbers -- if not all of them -- will have zero relevance to the investigation other than their proximity to the crime scene.

The police have stressed that responses are completely voluntary, but the plans for follow-up calls suggest the opposite. On the plus side, if someone doesn't want to speak to a cop, getting removed from the list is as simple as filling out a few questions on a website. No details were provided as to how much personal information respondents will have to turn over, though, so this exercise in government efficiency could become just another data-harvesting method. If not subjected to strict controls, any names collected could be run through criminal record databases in hopes of finding active warrants or unpaid fines. If so, it will be tempting to handle more investigations through tower dumps, text messages, and website questionnaires -- what with all the extra arrests and revenue generation that may result from bulk texting.

from the the-real-killer-here-are-the-killers dept

[A]ccording to the Advanced Interactive Media Group, an industry watchdog and analyst, Craigslist passed the 100-murder mark just three weeks ago, when a 22-year-old man from Gary, Ind., attempted to rob the middle-aged couple who’d arranged to buy his car.

Frankly, I'm surprised the number isn't higher. Not because Craigslist is the best thing that happened to pimps and murders since the invention of the internet, but because it encompasses nearly every major and minor city in the United States.

And, seriously: "Craigslist passed the 100-murder mark?" I realize "users of Craigslist passed the 100-murder mark" is a much clunkier sentence, but this sounds like it was written by a grandstanding sheriff, rather than a journalist.

Not only is it accessible by a vast majority of the US population, but its reach goes far beyond the buying and selling of goods. It also handles personal ads, searches for roommates and dozens of other ways for two strangers to meet face-to-face.

Sure, the voice behind this latest "let's worry about Craigslist" isn't a misguided government official or law enforcement officer with an anti-sex worker ax to grind. It's AIM's Peter Zollman, who's put together a completely not-for-profit SafeTrade "initiative," which helps set up safe areas for meetups and transactions, usually with the assistance of local law enforcement.

But to suggest this is a Craigslist problem -- rather than a human being problem -- is off-base. Nevertheless, Zollman makes this assertion:

Zollman and other critics say Craigslist has done “next to nothing” to encourage safe use or deter criminals. Among other things, the site doesn’t provide safety information unless a user explicitly seeks it out, and the company has not endorsed any third-party efforts — like Zollman’s own campaign to create “SafeTrade” spots at local police stations.

Zollman wants the site to make safety warnings more prominent and to get behind some sort of "safe trading" program, whether his or someone else's. But his company's tracking of "Craigslist murders" tries to imply it is somehow worse than the old system of classified ads in newspapers -- which arguably led to an exponentially higher number of murders than Craigslist has, even given the limited, very local reach of most papers.

Zollman's take on Craigslist is decidedly more measured than it was a few years ago, when he referred to it as a "cesspool of crime." Unfortunately, his willingness to play into fearful narratives that sell better than more measured takes on the issue undercuts the sincerity of his "SafeTrade" offer. And it does nothing to dissuade law enforcement and other government officials from attacking Craigslist for the acts of a very, very, very slim minority of its users.

Even when Zollman takes into account the positives of Craigslist, he still undercuts his own arguments by saying things like the company's "ethos of anonymity" makes it prime territory for criminal behavior -- something that throws shade at Craigslist and anonymity, as if both of these elements were inherently suspect, rather than just being treated as so much thrown baby/bathwater by the SafeTrade founder.

Common sense and personal responsibility are in short supply, which is why people are always happy to suggest it's the platforms they use that should be doing more, rather than doing anything of their own will and volition. Meeting a stranger always carries a risk. Doing so while carrying lots of cash even more so. (However, given the ubiquity of asset forfeiture programs, I'd be somewhat wary about taking large sums of cash to a police station…) I agree Craigslist should feature safety information more prominently, but then again, nothing in its warning is groundbreaking or otherwise unavailable to potential users.

And Zollman's murder tracker would be a lot more honest if it were simply a list of people who've used Craigslist to facilitate their criminal acts, rather than giving the impression that Craigslist is somehow, in some very minimal way, responsible for these incidents.

from the unindictable-ham-sandwiches-forced-to-brave-actual-due-process dept

Grand juries have proven capable of handing down nearly any indictment requested by prosecutors… if it's just a citizen on the receiving end. What's normally a rubber-stamping of charge recommendations tends to fall apart when a police officer is the potential defendant. With rare exceptions, actions that would have seen the average citizen charged with a crime are dismissed by grand juries -- whose only true consistency appears to be compliance. If a prosecutor doesn't want someone charged, a grand jury can just as easily be led in that direction as well.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Tuesday making California the first state in the nation to ban the use of grand juries to decide whether police officers should face criminal charges when they kill people in the line of duty.

In this move, there's a tacit admission that grand juries will buy whatever a cop-friendly prosecutor chooses to sell them. Beyond that, there's an open admission that grand jury proceedings are about as opaque as the legal process can get.

"What the governor's decision says is, he gets it -- the people don't want secrecy when it comes to officer-involved shootings," said retired judge and former San Jose independent police auditor LaDoris Cordell, the first African-American appointed as a judge in Northern California and a key supporter of the bill. "We're not trying to get more officers indicted. We're saying, 'Whatever you decide, do it in the open.'"

This should be the case in every grand jury presentment, not just those pertaining to police officers. And there's a lot of area left uncovered by the limitation of this ban to only the times when an officer manages to kill someone. But it's better than the current situation, which is generally a citizen's jailhouse railroad and an officer's slightly-delayed vehicle of absolution.

And, of course, prosecutors and police unions are against it.

[T]he California District Attorneys Association and the California Police Chiefs Association opposed the ban, saying the grand jury should be preserved as an option. Imposing a blanket prohibition would discriminate against police officers on the basis of their occupation, they argued.

As opposed to being discriminated for on the basis of their occupation? I don't think many people feel a grand jury has anything to do with due process. And that goes both ways. I'm sure cops would rather face a grand jury than a real "jury of their peers." The odds of walking away without charges is greatly increased in the former situation.

The two agencies unwilling to see their own thrown to the wolves face the harrowing nightmare that is due process have a suggestion: let's not scrap the cop-friendly grand jury system. Instead, let's put all the sunlight we can on cases where officers have been declared to have Done Nothing Wrong.

The association suggested that the Legislature could increase transparency by allowing grand jury transcripts to be released in cases for which no one was indicted.

The only thing transparent about these entities is their self-interest. The only way something like this could be framed as a "concession" is if the person delivering it is completely devoid of self-awareness and/or a conscience. While it would allow for some Monday morning quarterbacking of the grand jury's decision, it doesn't do anything to stop the underlying problem: that cops are routinely treated very differently than citizens by grand juries.

Mark Zahner of the District Attorneys Association, appears to have divested himself of his self-awareness and conscience years ago.

"It's absolutely ludicrous to espouse or believe that police officers get treated any differently than anyone else."

from the really-now? dept

Should someone who flies a drone near a wildfire be charged with murder if someone dies in that fire? At least one California District Attorney is insisting he's going to bring such charges should that situation occur.

It's wildfire season out here in California, and the story of the summer seems to be about drones and wildfires. There have been a whole bunch of stories about private drones somehow interfering with firefighting aircraft. The stories are almost always extremely vague with very few details. It's entirely possible that these stories are completely accurate -- and I certainly don't deny that it's possible that a drone could interfere with firefighting aircraft in some manner. However, something about these stories really has the feel of your typical local news exaggeration/moral panic. The coverage is always by local TV news reporters. The details are slim, but the moral panic aspect is ratcheted up quite high.

District Attorney Mike Ramos warned drone operators that they could and would be prosecuted for murder if their drones led to the death of a fire-fighting flight crew or anyone on the ground.

Of course, determining that a drone "led to the death" of anyone seems like a pretty big stretch -- and as far as I can tell, in all of the hysteria of drones and wildfires in the last month or so, there have been no deaths at all. But it seems like a huge stretch to argue that flying a drone over a fire can lead to murder charges. In the past, murder charges related to fires have been focused on things like arsonists who deliberately set the fire, rather than those who were just looking to observe or film the fire, and through their own ignorance got in the way of firefighting efforts.

Again, this isn't to diminish the possibility of real risks and potential damages from drones interfering with firefighters, but so much of this reads like a typical local news moral panic, and tossing in the threat of murder charges for flying a personal drone to observe a wild fire seems to go beyond any sense of reason. It feels like law enforcement issuing a bogus threat to try to sound serious.

from the your-rights-end-where-our-misconduct-begins dept

In a stinging rebuke, a criminal court judge removed the Orange County district attorney's office from one of its highest-profile murder cases, saying prosecutors had violated mass shooter Scott Dekraai's rights by repeatedly failing to turn over important evidence.

"Certain aspects of the district attorney's performance in this case might be described as a comedy of errors but for the fact that it has been so sadly deficient," Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals wrote in his ruling. "There is nothing funny about that."

An open-and-shut case involving the murder of eight people now is anything but. According to information pried loose by the public defenders assigned to Scott Dekraai's defense, prosecutors have partnered with law enforcement to place informants near charged suspects being held while awaiting trial in order to elicit confessions or admissions of other criminal activity, in exchange for pay, better treatment, etc.

The booting of the Orange County DA's office follows a 500+ page filing by the public defenders, more than half of which details similar jailhouse operations and a multitude of Brady violations committed by the same office over the past several years. This previously-withheld information -- much of it coming from a jailhouse computer log known as TRED -- is dismantling other "successful" prosecutions. Prosecutors have hid the existence of this database, as well as its contents, from defense teams and judges for most of 25 years.

Now, it's all falling apart. The defense team that uncovered this misconduct aren't hoping to get their client's case thrown out. But they are seeking to take the death penalty off the table. (The judge has not done so, despite his disqualifying the DA's office.) Dekraai killed eight people in broad daylight in front of witnesses, so there was never any doubt he committed the crimes he's charged with. But what happened behind bars while he awaited trial was illegal. The real point of this effort is to level the playing field going forward. These defense lawyers aren't looking to score a "win," per se, but rather seeking to have a fighting chance when defending the accused.

Take a long look at what's been done here. A defense team -- all public defenders -- spent a year going through 60,000 pages of documents. Some lawyers, perhaps far too many, would have let a hopeless case like Dekraai's run its course and put more effort into those deemed a bit more "winnable." But this team didn't, and now the ugliness of Orange County law enforcement is on full display.

On the other end, there have been no announcements of pending investigations or punishments for those involved in this wrongdoing. No prosecutor, jailer or sheriff's department officers have faced anything more than potential embarrassment for these deeds. The sheriff's office has "admitted" that "mistakes were made. The prosecutors' office hasn't expressed an interest in punishing the jailers who worked with law enforcement to pay jailhouse snitches to illegally record conversations with accused suspects. But the DA's office feels someone should pay the price for the office's misconduct -- and that person should be the judge who kicked it to the curb.

Since February 2014, the district attorney's office has asked to disqualify [Judge] Goethals — a former homicide prosecutor and defense attorney — in 57 cases, according to court records.

In 2011, records show, prosecutors made disqualification requests against Goethals just three times. In 2012, zero times. In 2013, only twice.

The office doesn't want to take its prosecutions to a forum where its integrity will be (rightly) questioned. So, it's just going to route around Goethals and hope that other judges haven't been following recent developments. In the meantime, it's going to be putting more man-hours on cases it thought it had already closed -- even the "easy wins" that just weren't "easy" enough. The ingrained behavior of the prosecution side is costing it convictions it could have secured simply by playing by the rules. But when you're used to cheating, you do it even when you don't have to.